True and Constant Friends

True and Constant Friends

Author: Kelley Paul

Publisher: Center Street

Published: 2015-04-14

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 145556074X

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Kelley Paul, wife of Senator Rand Paul, celebrates lifelong friendships in a beautifully illustrated book about the female bond. Feeling blessed to be one of seven friends who met and grew close in college-and looking forward to their celebration of a milestone birthday together-Kelley Paul wanted to know more about the women who were their first sources of love and inspiration, as her own grandmother and mother have been to her. So she asked each friend to tell her the story of a woman who influenced and guided her, who fostered her sense of joy, independence and courage. As you read each one, you'll discover, as Kelley did, that they're the stories of women everywhere, for they are personal yet universal, ordinary yet extraordinary. This lovely book also features works of art by the women of HomeFront Family Preservation Center and wise words of female authors and poets.


We Can't Be Friends

We Can't Be Friends

Author: Cyndy Etler

Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.

Published: 2017-10-03

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 1492635774

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The companion to The Dead Inside, "[An] unnerving and heartrending memoir" (Publishers Weekly) This is the story of my return to high school. This is the true story of how I didn't die. High school sucks for a lot of people. High school extra sucks when you believe, deep in your soul, that every kid in the school is out to get you. I wasn't popular before I got locked up in Straight Inc., the notorious "tough love" program for troubled teens. So it's not like I was walking around thinking everyone liked me. But when you're psychologically beaten for sixteen months, you start to absorb the lessons. The lessons in Straight were: You are evil. Your peers are evil. Everything is evil except Straight, Inc. Before long, you're a true believer. And when you're finally released, sent back into the world, you crave safety. Crave being back in the warehouse. And if you can't be there, you'd rather be dead.


Truth & Beauty

Truth & Beauty

Author: Ann Patchett

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2009-10-13

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 0061754811

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"A loving testament to the work and reward of the best friendships, the kind where your arms can’t distinguish burden from embrace.” — People New York Times Bestselling author Ann Patchett’s first work of nonfiction chronicling her decades-long friendship with the critically acclaimed and recently deceased author, Lucy Grealy. Ann Patchett and the late Lucy Grealy met in college in 1981, and, after enrolling in the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, began a friendship that would be as defining to both of their lives as their work. In Gealy's critically acclaimed and hugely successful memoir, Autobiography of a Face, she wrote about losing part of her jaw to childhood cancer, years of chemotherapy and radiation, and endless reconstructive surgeries. In Truth & Beauty, the story isn't Lucy's life or Ann's life, but the parts of their lives they shared together. This is a portrait of unwavering commitment that spans twenty years, from the long cold winters of the Midwest, to surgical wards, to book parties in New York. Through love, fame, drugs, and despair, this is what it means to be part of two lives that are intertwined...and what happens when one is left behind. This is a tender, brutal book about loving the person we cannot save. It is about loyalty and being uplifted by the sheer effervescence of someone who knew how to live life to the fullest.


All This Could Be Different

All This Could Be Different

Author: Sarah Thankam Mathews

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2023-08-01

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0593489144

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2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST ONE OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES' TOP 5 FICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR ONE OF TIME AND SLATE'S TOP 10 BOOKS OF THE YEAR Named one of the BEST BOOKS OF 2022 by NPR, Vogue, Vulture, BuzzFeed, Harper's Bazaar, and more “One of the buzziest, most human novels of the year…breathless, dizzying, and completely beautiful.” —Vogue “Dazzling and wholly original...[written] with such mordant wit, insight, and specificity, it feels like watching a new literary star being born in real time.” —Entertainment Weekly From a brilliant new voice comes an electrifying novel of a young immigrant building a life for herself—a warm, dazzling, and profound saga of queer love, friendship, work, and precarity in twenty-first century America Graduating into the long maw of an American recession, Sneha is one of the fortunate ones. She’s moved to Milwaukee for an entry-level corporate job that, grueling as it may be, is the key that unlocks every door: she can pick up the tab at dinner with her new friend Tig, get her college buddy Thom hired alongside her, and send money to her parents back in India. She begins dating women—soon developing a burning crush on Marina, a beguiling and beautiful dancer who always seems just out of reach. But before long, trouble arrives. Painful secrets rear their heads; jobs go off the rails; evictions loom. Sneha struggles to be truly close and open with anybody, even as her friendships deepen, even as she throws herself headlong into a dizzying romance with Marina. It’s then that Tig begins to draw up a radical solution to their problems, hoping to save them all. A beautiful and capacious novel rendered in singular, unforgettable prose, All This Could Be Different is a wise, tender, and riveting group portrait of young people forging love and community amidst struggle, and a moving story of one immigrant’s journey to make her home in the world.


Fakebook

Fakebook

Author: Dave Cicirelli

Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.

Published: 2013-09-17

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 1402284152

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If you abandon your life to discover yourself, can you discover your life by abandoning yourself? One October morning, Dave Cicirelli announced on Facebook that he was quitting his job and heading west. Many thought him brave-or crazy. No one guessed he was lying. Fed up with Facebook's superficiality, Dave fictionalized his profile. "Fake Dave" set off on a wild adventure, including TP'ing an Amish horse and buggy and being kidnapped by a religious cult. But what began as a prank quickly became a social experiment. Hundreds of people started following and connecting over Fake Dave's journey. Meanwhile, the real Dave was increasingly isolated by this secret and its implications. Hilarious and profoundly honest, FAKEBOOK explores our cultural obsession with social media and its powerful impact on our relationships, both online and in real life.


The Book of Lost Friends

The Book of Lost Friends

Author: Lisa Wingate

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Published: 2020-04-07

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 1984819895

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the bestselling author of Before We Were Yours comes a dramatic historical novel of three young women searching for family amid the destruction of the post–Civil War South, and of a modern-day teacher who learns of their story and its vital connection to her students’ lives. “An absorbing historical . . . enthralling.”—Library Journal Bestselling author Lisa Wingate brings to life startling stories from actual “Lost Friends” advertisements that appeared in Southern newspapers after the Civil War, as newly freed slaves desperately searched for loved ones who had been sold away. Louisiana, 1875: In the tumultuous era of Reconstruction, three young women set off as unwilling companions on a perilous quest: Hannie, a freed slave; Lavinia, the pampered heir to a now destitute plantation; and Juneau Jane, Lavinia’s Creole half sister. Each carries private wounds and powerful secrets as they head for Texas, following roads rife with vigilantes and soldiers still fighting a war lost a decade before. For Lavinia and Juneau Jane, the journey is one of stolen inheritance and financial desperation, but for Hannie, torn from her mother and siblings before slavery’s end, the pilgrimage west reignites an agonizing question: Could her long-lost family still be out there? Beyond the swamps lie the limitless frontiers of Texas and, improbably, hope. Louisiana, 1987: For first-year teacher Benedetta Silva, a subsidized job at a poor rural school seems like the ticket to canceling her hefty student debt—until she lands in a tiny, out-of-step Mississippi River town. Augustine, Louisiana, is suspicious of new ideas and new people, and Benny can scarcely comprehend the lives of her poverty-stricken students. But amid the gnarled live oaks and run-down plantation homes lie the century-old history of three young women, a long-ago journey, and a hidden book that could change everything.


The Friend (National Book Award Winner)

The Friend (National Book Award Winner)

Author: Sigrid Nunez

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2018-02-06

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 073521946X

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WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING NAOMI WATTS “A beautiful book . . . a world of insight into death, grief, art, and love.” —Wall Street Journal “A penetrating, moving meditation on loss, comfort, memory . . . Nunez has a wry, withering wit.” —NPR “Dry, allusive and charming . . . the comedy here writes itself.” —The New York Times The New York Times bestselling story of love, friendship, grief, healing, and the magical bond between a woman and her dog. When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatized by the inexplicable disappearance of its master, and by the threat of eviction: dogs are prohibited in her apartment building. While others worry that grief has made her a victim of magical thinking, the woman refuses to be separated from the dog except for brief periods of time. Isolated from the rest of the world, increasingly obsessed with the dog's care, determined to read its mind and fathom its heart, she comes dangerously close to unraveling. But while troubles abound, rich and surprising rewards lie in store for both of them. Elegiac and searching, The Friend is both a meditation on loss and a celebration of human-canine devotion.